Shocked that companies and mutual funds would invest OPM (Other People's Money) in high-risk investments, the Shocked Investor was originally on a mission to find out if our money ended up in these dubious instruments. This blog now also discusses other financial topics, such as straddles, options, gold, natural gas, agri/food stocks, and the collapse of the US Dollar.

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Thursday, July 7, 2011

Jose Graziano da Silva, the FAO’s director-general elect, said that food will remain costly for years and price swings will be around “for a long time,” .

World food prices rose again in June as sugar and dairy became more expensive, adding to inflationary pressures.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization said in a report that an index of 55 food commodities rose to 234 points from 231 points in May. The all-time high was 238 in February.

Expanding Population and New Tastes

As we have commented before, people, specially in Asia, are eating better, and that is causing great strains in fos production - and prices.

Bloomberg quotes analysts Veronique Riches-Flores and Loic de Galzain from Societe Generale: “The question of how to satisfy the food needs of an expanding population with ever more sophisticated tastes and an increasingly unified mode of consumption is getting even more pressing,”
The FAO estimates that world food output will have to rise 70% by 2050 as the global population climbs to 9.2 billion then.